


Our Little Life

by tackytiger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Past Lives, Dream Sex, Falling In Love, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Idiots in Love, M/M, Past Lives, Post-Hogwarts, Quantum Mechanics, Time Travel, Wartime Romance, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28158939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tackytiger/pseuds/tackytiger
Summary: Sometimes Harry dreams. Only they're not really dreams at all, and Malfoy is always in them.It's time travel, but not as we know it, and Harry just needs a good night's sleep.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 85
Kudos: 343
Collections: sitp all-time faves





	Our Little Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shealwaysreads (onereader)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onereader/gifts).



> For Bella, my dear friend, here's to two years and many more to come. You're an inspiration and a delight, and I feel so lucky to have you in my life.
> 
> Huge thanks to maesterchill and m0stlyvoid for reading this at the eleventhest of eleventh hours, and for generally being incredible.
> 
> I have to credit Dorothy Sayers here for the Latin bit which is taken from Gaudy Night, because I may be a cheeseball but that bit is a perfect falling-in-love moment. Title is from Shakespeare because I'm basic like that.
> 
> For the purposes of this fic, I'm taking it that Harry can be a shortening for Henry. And I did speak to a very clever physicist about the time travel elements, so please be assured that all fudging and missteps are my own.

Sometimes, Harry dreamed.

In a way, they didn’t feel like dreams at all. Malfoy was always in them, and he always seemed very much himself, with the same handsome crooked smile and strong hands and that arresting silvery hair.

When the dreams first started, Harry didn’t understand them very well—partly because they were fragmented, nothing like being asleep usually felt like, just bright convincing flashes of something vivid and foreign that made him feel inexplicably breathless. But partly because back then, in school, he hadn’t known Malfoy to look anything like he did in the dreams. That dream smile of his was all brand new, and dream-Harry hadn’t quite known what to do with it.

The dreams began in Eighth Year, and he didn’t have them often—only a handful of times in that whole weird year when they were all back at Hogwarts, but could have been anywhere for all they gave a shit. And Malfoy was there too, taller and quieter but still hateful, expensive-looking and unsmiling and tired; not like he had looked in Sixth Year, when Harry had felt like the world was ending and Malfoy had given up Quidditch, but exhausted in a weirdly grown-up way, like he had seen too much and knew more was coming.

The first time he had one of the dreams, Harry wasn’t surprised that Malfoy was in it. He still hated Malfoy, of course, but the kiss had just happened—it was nothing special, or shouldn’t have been anyway, just both of them drunk and stuck under some enchanted mistletoe that someone had thought would be a good idea to hang in the Eighth Year common room. And everyone was watching and laughing, though it wasn’t really funny, and Harry and Malfoy were both so furious when their lips met that it should have been miserable. Only it wasn’t, it was just a fucking brilliant kiss, with just the right amount of pressure and the opening heat of Malfoy’s mouth under his, and then Harry had his hands in Malfoy’s hair and Malfoy gave a muffled whimper against Harry’s mouth, and they very nearly forgot themselves before they stopped, peeling themselves apart, Malfoy wiping the back of his hand over his mouth in some sort of dumb horror. So really, it made sense that Harry was dreaming about Malfoy, because it really wasn’t easy to stop thinking about that kiss.

The dreams were always the same that year, and they always took place in Hogwarts, maybe because of the old magic leaching from the walls. Malfoy was always Malfoy in them, or some version of him anyway, and Harry was always Harry, but in the dreams everything else was different.

Back then, in the early dreams, they were always fighting. It was a proper battle, dirty and noisy, Harry’s stomach curdled with sour fear, the same familiar focused terror of wartime that real-Harry remembered so well. 

But nothing else was the same in the dreams, because in them Harry and Malfoy were always fighting _together_ , back to back, Malfoy’s body warm and solid and safe against Harry’s. Sometimes dream-Malfoy spoke to Harry, and dream-Harry always understood, though real-Harry knew that the words were unfamiliar, old and French-sounding and weird, but weirder still was the ease with which dream-Malfoy’s mouth curled around Harry’s name ( _Henri_ , he called him, smiling even over the din of battle, and even real-Harry knew how right the name felt when dream-Malfoy said it like that). 

Harry wasn’t even sure what was really happening in the dreams; though he knew that they were in Hogwarts, of course—no matter how fractured and fuzzy the dream, the feel of the cool stone of the corridors was the same as in real life, as Harry and Malfoy raced endlessly through them, a haze of battle spells zinging around them.

Harry woke up one morning and lay in bed, in the heaving morning hum of the Eighth Year dorm, and remembered asking dream-Malfoy, “Where’s my wand?”

Dream-Malfoy had looked at him with the same dismissive sideways glance that real-Malfoy had given him so many times, only in the dream, Malfoy’s eyes were soft and confused. He had no wand in the dreams either, Harry realised, though he did have a big fuck-off longsword that he was wielding with two hands. 

Harry didn’t mind the dreams usually (though they were weird, they weren’t any weirder than all the Voldemort dreams), but this one had disturbed him. Dream-Malfoy had been so close, where they were shoved together in the alcove on what was in real life the fifth floor Charms corridor, and Harry remembered saying to him, “Where are we? Where are we, Malfoy?” and Malfoy had sheathed the sword, just slid it smoothly into the leather sheath at his hip until the throat of the sword was buried in the leather of the scabbard, and then he’d touched a gauntleted hand to Harry’s chest, resting lightly over his heart with a clink of metal against metal, because _of course_ dream-Harry was wearing some sort of chain mail, though he was only noticing it now as the edges of the dream sharpened up. 

“Henri,” Malfoy said, and the concerned little crease between his eyes deepened as he looked down at Harry. “Myne owne hertis rote,” Malfoy said quietly, and real-Harry didn’t know how he understood, but he did—and in that one suspended dream moment, he was so glad to be able to understand, and he wanted Malfoy to say it all again, so badly—and he smiled at Malfoy, almost unable to help himself, real-Harry dimly horrified at himself for it but dream-Harry just allowing himself to do it, and enjoying it.

And as Harry lay in bed worrying about the dream, he remembered how dream-Malfoy had looked then, smiling back at him with something like relief, like Harry smiling at him _meant_ something. And then he had nodded, and turned at a sudden noise from the corridor outside, already sliding the sword free—deadly quiet, fast as could be—and was gone without even a backwards glance at Harry, as though trusting that he would follow. And the worst thing, real-Harry thought, was that in the dream, which was already bleeding into the real world as he started to wake, he _had_ followed. Had _wanted to_ follow. 

Over breakfast later that day, he had watched Malfoy across the table, feeling slow and stupid and so tired, not really knowing what he was doing. It wasn’t as though he was going to catch a shadow of dream-Malfoy’s smile on real-Malfoy’s face, after all. But as Malfoy reached for the marmalade, Harry saw the fine bones of his hand shifting and the strong straining line of tendon running tense at the base of his thumb, and he had been reminded of dream-Malfoy gripping the long hilt of his sword with intent. 

A long time after—years later—he had asked Malfoy, lying across Malfoy’s big bed with his head resting in the scooped-out curve of Malfoy’s hip, “Do you know how to use a sword?” and Malfoy had half-laughed in surprise, and told him about years of fencing lessons, and the suits of armour he used to plunder at the Manor as a child, and Harry had buried his face in Malfoy’s skin and whispered, “My own heart’s root,” so quietly that Malfoy never even heard it. 

But all that came much later.

* * *

“Malfoy’s back,” Ron said.

Harry was exhausted, and it was Monday morning after a long weekend full of bad decisions, and he hadn’t been sleeping well, and the last thing he wanted was to talk about Malfoy.

“Why would I care?” He didn’t care if he sounded short, just shoved a teabag in his cup and closed his eyes, leaning against the wall and listening to the kettle groaning to a boil.

“Well.” Ron sounded amused, because he was a prick of the highest order when it came to annoying Harry. “Because of the whole…” 

Harry opened his eyes tiredly, just in time to see Ron gesturing in a fairly unequivocal manner.

“That was one kiss,” he replied, “a long time ago. And I didn’t even care about Malfoy then, so I’m not sure why you think I’d care now.”

He didn’t wait for Ron, who was cheerfully squeezing his own teabag with a small spoon, just took his cup and left, though he didn’t go back to their office. Instead, he slipped out into one of the stupid charmed courtyards the Ministry had shoehorned in around the building, to try to bring the outside in. 

Harry felt a bit sick, because despite everything—Malfoy being a prick in real life, and everything he had always hated about him, and not seeing him for three years after Malfoy had fucked off to who-knows-where after they all finished school—the dreams had continued ever since, and Harry still hadn’t mentioned them to anyone. And sometimes he didn’t dream, or just dreamed normal dreams like everyone had, and he thought that maybe they had stopped for good. And then the dreams would come back, dream-Malfoy always in them, and it was always a fresh shock. Harry didn’t _want_ to be dreaming dreams about stupid bloody Malfoy, for fuck’s sake. But the dreams were relentless nonetheless.

And Harry, stupidly, had let the dreams begin to bleed gently into what he felt about real-Malfoy. Had begun to tell himself that they might mean something. After all, there had to be _something_ to justify how sharp and unexpected and vivid they were, so much so that Harry had told himself they couldn’t all be coming from his own head. They had to be some sort of sign of _something_. 

But now Malfoy was back in England, and Harry was starting to wonder if he was just using the dreams to try and justify things to himself—if he had taken that same old fucking fascination he’d always had with Malfoy, and turned it on its head, and done something very stupid with it. And he couldn’t even tell Ron about it.

Maybe, just maybe, Harry just wanted to fuck Malfoy so badly that his subconscious was trying to make up some nicer versions of Malfoy for him to project onto. And how pathetic was that?

Because though he really _didn’t_ care that Malfoy was back, he had in fact already known. Because he had spent most of Friday night in bed with Malfoy, both of them half drunk, dazed with a kind of feverish desire that was still shocking to Harry, even though it wasn’t even the first time they’d fucked (not even the second, or the third, or the fourth, in fact). 

But he couldn’t tell Ron that, of course; couldn’t say that he knew Malfoy had actually been back in London for almost four months, and that in that time Harry and he had fucked five times, plus had one frustrating, interrupted encounter in the toilets at Egg that started the whole thing. Because Ron wouldn’t understand.

And Friday night had been brilliant, and awful, like it always was with Malfoy. And then Harry had Saturday night alone, and spent all of it waking, shivery and unsatisfied, from dreams of Malfoy—all variations on the same dream, over and over and over, dream-Malfoy on his haunches in a shallow stream, nose red and peeling, a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head, the rough cotton of his shirt dark with sweat. He was laughing up at dream-Harry, and in his hands he held a large flat gravel-filled pan which he was swishing through the water. Harry thought if he had to watch Malfoy’s smile begin one more time he might go mad, and he couldn’t imagine why Malfoy was even in his head at all. He certainly thought he’d fucked Malfoy out of his system fairly efficiently the night before. But Harry knew that the dreams didn’t ever go away for good.

* * *

“We’re going to be working together,” Malfoy said. Harry felt the familiar surge of irritation flood through him. They were naked, lying side by side but not touching. Harry was still breathing heavily, still slippy and wet with Malfoy’s come. He wondered, not for the first time, why Malfoy always had to ruin everything.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He sat up, wincing, and groped in the sheets for his wand—for any wand—and then heaved himself out of bed and started searching in the half-dark for his clothes.

Malfoy told him then, about the new job at the DMLE. About how he’d be reporting to Robards, same as Harry; working out of Level Two, same as Harry. It was why he’d come back to London, it turned out, not that he had said that to Harry all those months ago in the toilet cubicle, when he was fumbling with the buttons of Harry’s jeans and muttering expletives against Harry’s lips. Or any time since, for that matter.

“So this can’t happen again,” Malfoy finished. “It’s a bad idea anyway.” He stretched, unselfconscious, the sharp cold winter moonlight glancing off the tracks of his scar lines, silvering them up. He started to say something else, but it was swallowed by a yawn, and he turned his face into the pillow, groping around him for the duvet that only five minutes before, Harry had been tangled in.

“It’s been a bad idea this whole time,” Harry said crossly. “That never stopped you before.” But Malfoy was already asleep, swaddled in the duckdown covers, leaving Harry to Floo himself home resentfully. Malfoy was such a shit, he thought when he was in his own bed, alone. But he was easy, restful in a way that not many people were, because Harry didn’t ever have to worry about him in the slightest. And the sex was so good. Not that it wasn’t messy, or awkward sometimes—Harry rather suspected that, like Harry himself, Malfoy hadn’t much experience. But they figured the logistics out easily, and everything else was simple after that, because when it came down to it, all they really had to do was learn each other’s bodies, and they had always been skilled at learning each other. 

Harry didn’t remember ever wanting someone more—there was a confidence to knowing Malfoy so intimately (the wet velvety inside of his mouth, the soft resistance of fucking into him, the look on his face when he came), and Harry was absolutely mad for him in a way he hadn’t expected. He wasn’t any of the dream-Malfoys, but then Harry wasn’t dream-Harry either, and maybe what they had between them was nothing, but nothing was more than enough for Harry. And then they stopped it all, whatever _it_ was. But the dreams continued.

* * *

After a while, Harry stopped minding. He hardly saw Malfoy at work, even though technically they were on the same floor, because they were always on different jobs. And dream-Malfoy was fine, actually. Dream-Harry was certainly fond of him; they were always friends in Harry’s dreams, in a way real-Harry and real-Malfoy never had been, and really there were only so many nights Harry could spend dreaming about Malfoy being nice to him before he stopped hating the thought of him (the real him).

And it was just as well, because he could hardly remember all the times that he had gone for weeks or months without any dreams at all, because they had started up again with a vengeance, and Harry’s nights were a furious barrage of Malfoy after Malfoy after Malfoy.

Sometimes it was the same dream for week after week. 

Malfoy flying high over patchwork fields real-Harry didn’t recognise, leaning low over a clumsy-looking broom, hair sleek and parted down the middle, sporting a thin moustache that was less stupid-looking than it should have been, Harry in the air beside him, both of them swooping into dives and laughing, always laughing.

Malfoy on a city street in the softest-looking t-shirt Harry had ever seen, a paper cone spilling over with flowers tucked in the crook of an elbow—Soloman’s Seal, dream-Harry helpfully supplied, and geraniums—and the proud nobbly jut of what dream-Harry knew was going to be a perfect Flute Campagne from the top of a cotton shopper bag slung over Mafoy’s shoulder, a streetsign behind him reading Rue Ste-Catherine Est, and above that again, the defiant flutter of a rainbow flag.

Malfoy, incongruously, in a boat—a tiny thing, hide stretched over wood, the sweet elegant curve of the prow beckoning them forward, behind them nothing but the rocky rise of a small island, ahead of them nothing but sea the same grey as Malfoy’s eyes. Harry in a cream wool jumper the twin of Malfoy’s, both of them with sleeves rolled up against the pull of the oars. Harry leaned forward, and as often happened, dream-Harry took over and let the words come. “Le chéile, mo chuisle,” he told Malfoy, and Malfoy grinned at him, white teeth against skin a darker gold than Harry would have imagined for him, eyes creased against the sun, hair tucked under a flat tweed cap, and what the fuck even _is this_ , Harry wondered. 

He had to push against dream-Harry to find his own words, lost in the dream for just a moment, any worries from his real life borne away on the shiver of the tide and the brackish whip of a sea wind. “Why am I here?” he asked dream-Malfoy as he started pulling himself out of the dream, and watched that twitch of concern travel over dream-Malfoy’s face before Harry blinked awake, alone.

* * *

“Do you ever wonder if we might have been friends in a different life?” he asked real-Malfoy at work later that day. He supposed it wasn’t exactly appropriate work conversation, especially since Malfoy had made it clear from the day he started that he would avoid talking to Harry at all costs. But Harry felt looser around Malfoy somehow, now that the dreams were so frequent and so lovely, and he was unreasonably annoyed by real-Malfoy’s uneasy silences. In fact, at that moment, Malfoy was trying to make a cup of tea beside him in the tiny kitchenette while at the same time persistently and ostentatiously pretending that Harry didn’t exist.

Malfoy’s shoulders stiffened, but his face was a pleasant blank when he turned to Harry (carefully cultivated, Harry was sure. Malfoy had never been able to moderate himself around Harry before. And of course dream-Malfoy never had to try. Harry had forgotten that).

“I would hate you in any universe, in any lifetime,” he said cheerfully, and Harry would have lost his temper at that, before, but now he noticed the slow pinkening at the base of Malfoy’s throat, and the twitch of his fingers around the mug, and he thought about the latest dream-Malfoy—swaying opposite Harry on some anonymous crowded subway carriage in some anonymous crowded city, with his head shaved to a velvet sheen, his smiling mouth a careful lipsticked red—and Harry wondered. 

* * *

“Have you heard of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?” Harry asked Malfoy cheerfully as he finished filling his cup and nudged the kettle handle around to Malfoy, and then smiled to himself as Malfoy started to laugh.

“It’s all I ever think about,” Malfoy said, voice warm and amused and very close to Harry’s ear, and Harry remembered with a flash of heat some sort of guitar player dream-Malfoy, sinuous in leather trousers, groaning in dream-Harry’s ear, “You’re all I ever think about.”

“Remind me to tell you about it sometime,” Harry said, and elbowed him gently. “Hermione and I were talking about it last weekend in the pub, I think you might be interested.”

“I doubt it,” Malfoy said, yawning right in Harry’s face, only partly from real exhaustion after a long week of potions raids. Even six months before it would have made Harry want to punch him right in his stupid open mouth, but they were friends now in that intense way that Aurors often were, after dismal months of forced proximity and dull assignments and partnerships that didn’t seem to make sense at first, until they did. And now, because they were friends, seeing Malfoy yawning just made Harry want to wrap him in a blanket and cook him a nice dinner. Which was, funnily enough, what the most recent dream-Harry had been doing for his dream-Malfoy for weeks now, because the dreams were as vivid as ever and they were no less frequent. 

“Someday,” Harry murmured, “you’re going to want to hear about this.” But Malfoy—real, solid Malfoy, standing right there with Harry in the tiny Ministry kitchenette—just smiled and went digging in the fridge for some milk.

* * *

They were in a small room above a pub called the Olde Cheshire Cheese, dream-Harry knew, and he was warm and full of lamb stew and good wine, and he was having fun. So much fun, in fact, that real-Harry had just been wondering why _he_ never went out for nice meals with _his_ friends, instead of just sitting around in grotty pubs and getting even grottier takeaways on the walk home. Malfoy might like to go to a nice restaurant, Harry thought.

But anyway, real-Malfoy was nothing like this dream-Malfoy, who was pink-cheeked from heat and booze, with his hair pushed back and curling behind his ears, and wearing some sort of flouncy linen shirt with a froth of frills spilling down from the base of his throat. It rather suited him, Harry had been thinking, and then dream-Malfoy was moving towards him, still talking about whatever he had been talking about when the dream started. His fingertips were black with ink. The loose cuffs of his shirtsleeves slipped further up his arm as he gesticulated—no Mark, Harry thought absently, because he never had the Mark in Harry’s dreams, and he wondered what _that_ said about his subconscious—and then, without fanfare, as though it was something he had done a hundred times before, dream-Malfoy kissed him.

“Oh,” Harry said stupidly, into Malfoy’s warm mouth, dismayed. “Oh.”

Dream-Malfoy pulled back, confused, but he was still touching Harry, one hand deep in the curls at the base of Harry’s skull, the anchoring pull of his hand strangely familiar. Dream-Harry, the Harry who seemed to know what this was, tried to chase the kiss, but real-Harry managed to stop himself. 

“It can’t be just that I’ve fallen in love with you,” he told dream-Malfoy wonderingly, “Can it? Is that why it’s always you?” and Malfoy narrowed his eyes at Harry and said matter-of-factly, “You have me entirely taken over, I’m afraid. And I like it not, but here we are, and you are my dearest boy, so kiss me now and let me remember it tomorrow.”

“I’m not going to kiss you,” he told dream-Malfoy meanly, and dream-Malfoy’s mouth curled up in challenge, like Harry was amusing him, and his hand tightened in Harry’s hair, and rather than lean back in Harry tried to will himself out of the dream, hurtling towards wakefulness with a speed borne entirely of resentment, until he woke panting and pissed off and turned on in his own bed in Grimmauld.

The next morning he was in such a bad mood that Ron nearly hexed him out of their shared cubicle twice, and everything at work felt even more boring and pointless than usual, and took twice as long so that he was late for teabreak. And when he went to the kitchenette for his cuppa, he found his favourite mug full of perfectly brewed tea, still steaming gently under one of Malfoy’s Stasis Charms, and it felt like the last straw.

He did some fairly over-the-top storming through the corridors back to the DMLE headquarters, which in hindsight was going to be embarrassing, but by the time he got there he still felt hot and cross and itchy, like the heavy brewing feeling right before a break in the weather. He realised he was still holding his cup of tea. He didn’t care.

“Malfoy,” he said sharply, and half the heads in the room snapped around to look then carefully looked away again at the sight of him. Malfoy himself was in his cubicle, not even bothering to look up from his files; Harry could see the infuriating dip of his bent head through the open side of the cubicle, where he was still reading. Tracey Davis, Malfoy’s partner, aimed a kick at him under the table. He put the file down.

“Malfoy,” Harry said again, and Malfoy sighed and stood up.

“I’ve told you before, I won’t deal with you when you’re in a mood.” He sounded tired, Harry thought. “Go away and have a walk and come back when you’re ready to go over the Littlegate file properly.”

“I think you should go out with me,” Harry said. Which. Well, it wasn’t exactly what he had come up there to say, with the storming and the brandishing of the teacup and all of that, but all Harry could think of was all the dream-Malfoys—the kissing one, and the one who looked like he very much might have just got off a horse before the dream started, and the one who Harry had met in some wild dream woods who had an _actual_ bow and arrow, and the Malfoy with the full golden beard who Harry had only seen for a brief glimpse but who had told dream-Harry, “I know you prefer me clean-shaven but…” before real-Harry had been woken by his alarm, and before he could tell that dream-Malfoy, “Well, actually…”—and how they all liked Harry so much more than real-Malfoy did, and he was fucking sick of it.

“I most certainly fucking will not,” Malfoy said, startled into loudness, and then he sat down abruptly, uncertainly.

“Why not?” Davis asked Malfoy interestedly, and Harry was glad because that was exactly what he had been going to ask, but Malfoy just looked at them both crossly, helplessly, and shrugged.

“It’s not a good idea,” Ron supplied cheerfully over the top of the cubicle divider, and Malfoy put his head in his hands. “There’s a rule against it. It’s in the handbook.” Which was probably correct, now that Harry thought about it, that stupid handbook which had been the biggest shock of them all when he started training, with all its dry legalese and admin standards. Harry hadn’t expected any of that.

“That’s fine,” Harry said, not taking his eyes off Malfoy, “I’m quitting anyway.” And at the sight of Malfoy’s thinning mouth, he hastily added, “Not because of—” and waved his hand meaningfully between them. And it was true, he had written his resignation letter weeks before, and it was crumpled and grubby from being carried around in his pocket while he waited for the right time, hardly daring to imagine a day when he didn’t have to come into the DMLE offices and spend all his time trying desperately to not mind how much of an effort it all was. 

He had written the letter at three in the morning after waking from one of his dreams, feeling sick and haunted by the memory of dream-Malfoy (long hair, massive flares, eyes narrowed against the smoke from a sweet-smelling hand-rolled cigarette he had just stubbed out) leaning over him, his clever quick fingers turning a wand around carefully as he inspected it, saying, “It’s beautiful, Potter. Well done.” And real-Harry had realised that dream-Harry had _made_ that wand, and real-Harry could remember the silky slide of alder under his fingers, and the easy magic of the tools—lathe and chisel and gouge—and the feel of being satisfied, of the knowledge that he had done _enough_. Real-Harry had never felt like that about work.

“Potter.” Malfoy’s voice was tight. “A moment in private, please?”

Harry felt that if he could just tell Malfoy about the dreams, then Malfoy would understand. That Harry was quite possibly driving himself mad thinking about Malfoy during the day, and then having to see versions of him at night too. And he wanted to tell Malfoy about the dream he’d had of them together, in which the two of them looked almost exactly as they did now, only there was something easier in the lines of their faces, something less hunted. Harry didn’t think that this dream-Malfoy and dream-Harry had ever been in a war.

“You’re a prick,” dream-Harry had said, and dream-Malfoy had laughed at that. 

“I hate you too,” dream-Malfoy had replied sweetly, and that had been the end of the dream, except when Harry woke up he had felt inexplicably sad, like he was grieving over something. 

He wanted to tell his Malfoy, “I see how things could be for us, I see it all the time,” but he knew that Malfoy wouldn’t get it. So instead he just told Malfoy, “I want you to like me as much as I like you,” and that was finally, grimly, satisfying, because Malfoy went pink and blotchy all of a sudden and then nodded, and said, “Fine. Let’s go out then,” like it was some sort of challenge, and he knew he was going to win.

* * *

Harry found dream-Malfoy on the southern wall, in his favourite lookout, right above the gatehouse. At this spot, overlooking the river, the walls were the depth of a house, and tall enough that Harry could see all the way down the stretch of straight Roman road that led west to Aquae Sulis. Dream-Malfoy’s back was straight, and he must have been expecting Harry, because he didn’t even jump when Harry spoke. He was wearing a toga, which Harry thought he might have to come back to at a later point.

“I thought I’d find you here,” dream-Harry said, and real-Harry shivered at the tone of his own voice, so knowing and amused and horribly fond. Dream-Harry didn’t seem to care at all that Malfoy could hear it.

“Henricus,” dream-Malfoy said, and reached an idle hand back to take Harry’s in his own. “It has been a long summer. How was the journey? I’m glad that you made it back before the delegation arrives. I shall have need of you.” His hand was cold, though the sun blazed livid over the swell of the hill ahead; he must have been standing in the shadow of the lookout post for a long time.

“Still no sign?” dream-Harry asked, and real-Harry looked curiously down the road that dream-Malfoy was watching so carefully. 

“We’ll see their dust long before they arrive,” dream-Harry went on. “You might as well come and eat.”

“It’s important that I’m ready to greet them when they arrive.” Dream-Malfoy ran his thumb consideringly over the slopes of Harry’s knuckles. “My father…”

Harry wondered if there was any possible universe in which Malfoy wasn’t an absolute dick about his dad, but then dream-Malfoy raised Harry’s hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, a close-mouthed gentle courtly type of kiss, nothing dangerous, but Harry felt his pulse kick and gallop just as dream-Harry’s did, and he decided to stop thinking about Lucius completely. This was just a dream after all, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d have here before he woke.

“You look good,” he said, and this time he couldn’t quite tell if it was dream-Harry or himself saying it, and dream-Malfoy laughed.

“I wanted them to feel at home.” He turned, finally, to face Harry, and his eyes were bright with amusement. “Look.” And he shook his curls back so Harry could see the gold loop through his ear, that stupid Roman affectation that on anyone else Harry would have hated.

“You’re a show-off.” And that was all real-Harry, though he sounded soft and admiring, and he stepped closer, nudged at the thin curl of hammered wire, tugged at Malfoy’s earlobe. “They’ll eat you up, Draco.”

“They can try,” Malfoy sounded pleased, like Harry was telling him the punchline of some private joke, and that was all it took, that sly shared smile that had Harry wanting like he didn’t think he’d ever wanted before.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and then he took over completely from dream-Harry, realising as he did so that really, there was not much difference between how he felt and how this strange dream-Harry felt about Malfoy, and he slid his hand into Malfoy’s hair and kissed him.

Malfoy made a pleased sound in his throat, and then his arms were going around Harry’s neck, and Harry was clutching at the small of his back, fingers whispering over the cool landscape of the linen and down to grasp the hem of Malfoy’s toga in his greedy fist.

Harry’s fingers went to the _fibula_ at Malfoy’s shoulder, but Malfoy murmured something about how he should leave it unless he was prepared to redrape it, and anyway Harry found he could get at almost all of Malfoy’s skin by going in from the hem up, and when the dream started to fade, Harry woke with the memory of Malfoy’s ribcage shuddering beneath his fingers. But this time, real-Malfoy was next to him, sprawled in sleep halfway across the old carved tester bed in his old room in Malfoy Manor, and Harry could touch for real.

Later that morning, after breakfast, they walked the bounds of the estate. Malfoy was quiet, pale in the wash of early summer sun. Harry knew Malfoy didn’t want Harry to be there with him, back in this place where neither of them could escape exactly who they had been during the war, but he let Harry take his hand anyway, sighing as though he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s the River Kennet.” He showed Harry with an expansive sweeping arm, and something in the careless movement of it reminded Harry vividly of the sweep of creamy linen and the glint of gold at his earlobe. 

“Cunetio,” Harry replied, testing the name on his tongue, and Malfoy looked at him sharply, though without surprise. 

“Yes,” he replied. “The Manor is built on the site of the old city. We have… coins, and things. You know. In the library.” As though Harry, born in a cottage, raised in a cupboard, could _possibly_.

“Have you ever considered getting an earring?” he asked instead, then pulled Malfoy in so he could take Malfoy’s earlobe in his teeth, curl his tongue over the velvety skin at the hinge of Malfoy’s jawline.

“Harry,” Malfoy said breathlessly, and it was so new, still, to hear his name in Malfoy’s mouth, especially when he said it like that. Harry dropped to his knees, and Malfoy’s hand found its way into his hair as he started on the fastenings of Malfoy’s trousers, Malfoy’s grip on him too rough and shocked and so completely right.

Harry dredged up the memory of the dream—and how often over the years had he wished he could forget them all, scrub out all the details of every time dream-Malfoy had smiled at him, or laid a hand upon him so casually that Harry wanted to hit him, or every time dream-Malfoy had said his name ( _Henri, Hendrik, Hari, Anraoi, Harry, Harry, Harry…_ ) but now he concentrated on it, felt his way back to the dream-Harry of nearly two millennia before, lives and lives and lives ago and all of them spent loving Malfoy.

“Placetne, domine?” he asked, and Malfoy’s hand tightened in his hair.

“Placet,” Malfoy answered, because of course he knew Latin, like the entitled prick he was, and he was standing quietly with the sun in his eyes and his hand cupping the base of Harry’s skull, and he was smiling.

* * *

“Potter.”

Malfoy looked up from where he was sitting at a battered old table, his face haunted-looking and hollowed out by the dancing shadows of the oil lamp.

“You should sleep, Potter. It’s almost time.”

Harry crossed the floor so he could be nearer, just like he always did whenever he dreamed, these days. He could hear the noise of hundreds of other men outside, through thin canvas walls, though the night was mercifully quiet otherwise. Dream-Harry was, real-Harry realised, waiting for the desperate scream of shells and the rattle of bullets to start.

“I don’t think I can sleep,” he said, and his voice was thin and scratchy from months of too many cigarettes, and no rest, and shouting. Malfoy sighed.

“I’ll just finish this up,” Malfoy told him, scribbling furiously at the very bottom of a sheet of notepaper, already crammed with his elegant swooping handwriting. “Would you please see it to the field post office in the morning, before…” 

He sighed again, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands, a gesture Harry recognised from other Malfoys down through the dreams, and originally from small real Malfoy, cross and tired all the way across the Great Hall. Malfoy stood up.

“Please, Potter. Sit.”

Dream-Harry stumbled on his way to the stool, and Malfoy’s steadying hand was at his elbow, an anchor. Outside, there was a loud crash, then laughter. Both Harry and Malfoy jumped.

By the time Harry was sitting, he could feel his eyes drooping. He didn’t think he had ever been so exhausted in any life. Malfoy was kneeling, and Harry wasn’t quite sure when he had done that, through the horrid haze of tiredness and that permanent gut-deep terror that even real-Harry couldn’t quite shake. 

“Up,” dream-Malfoy said, tapping Harry’s left leg, and then he lifted Harry’s foot and began easing his boot off. The muck and filth of the trenches was getting all over him, over the crisp cream of his uniform trousers, and over those quick clever hands of his that dream-Harry had seen dismantle a .303 like he was born to do it, which he probably was. Harry’s eyes fluttered shut again, and Malfoy moved onto his other foot.

“You know,” Malfoy began quietly, “things are likely to go badly tomorrow. And… well. I shan’t be a bore about it, but you should know… that is, these past few months I have felt closer to you than I ever have to any other person in this world.” Harry forced his eyes open, looked down at Malfoy’s face in the guttering light: the shadow of his startling dark lashes, and the twist of his thin, mobile mouth, and the pallour of war that touched even the most beautiful things, that crept over everything, here in these hateful trenches not far from a small town called Caudry.

"Draco," he said, and his voice was too loud in the small confines of the tent, and Malfoy's eyes flickered sideways towards the opening in the canvas, but Harry had tied it shut after him, and anyway there was no one outside to hear. But he dropped his voice anyway, and it was almost a whisper when he looked Malfoy in the eye and murmured, "Sir."

Malfoy's hands dropped to his sides and he shut his eyes as though he was in pain, which maybe he was. This war was hard on the body. Just in case, Harry took his time undressing him, hands sure and careful over all the buckles and straps, fingers easily teasing out the brass buttons that this dream-Harry had been the one to polish. He pushed the jacket off dream-Malfoy's shoulders, tugged off his vest until finally dream-Malfoy was pale and naked in the candlelight. None of the dream-Malfoys had real-Malfoy's scars, but this one had some that were all his own, puckered and angry like an inferno of damage across his chest. He hissed when Harry put a hand on him, but pressed eagerly into the touch nonetheless, and then he started to take Harry's clothes off too, fumbling with all the buttons but no less gentle than Harry had been.

The trenches were so hot and dirty, and real-Harry could feel in the itch of his skin that dream-Harry hadn't been properly clean in a long time, but it didn't seem to matter much when he and dream-Malfoy were both naked and lying on one of the scratchy army-issue blankets on the tent floor. They had to be very quiet, and it was so hard, because Harry wanted Malfoy to talk to him while they touched each other (like real-Malfoy did in Harry's real life, spilling everything he felt breathlessly into Harry's ear, mouth wet and hot and wanting). But dream-Malfoy was so quiet even at the end, when he just gasped silently and arched upwards, coming over Harry's hand, and Harry kept his own face buried in the pale curve of dream-Malfoy's neck to muffle his own sounds.

Afterwards, they didn't have time to linger, and when they were dressed again dream-Malfoy looked just as he always did—unruffled, commanding, unconcerned. But he took Harry's face between his hands and kissed him easily, and then he smiled one of his rare proper smiles, and it was Malfoy there below the surface, the same Malfoy Harry had known in a thousand lifetimes and now got to have for real as well.

"Potter," dream-Malfoy said, "you know I'm not very brave. But I would die myself, and gladly so, if it meant that I didn't have to send my men out into that tomorrow."

And Harry wanted to reply, to tell him that he understood, but the dream was receding, candlelight blinking out into the cool morning stillness of real-Harry's own bedroom at Grimmauld. 

Malfoy was looking at him questioningly, his face very close to Harry’s on the pillow, still creased and pink from sleep.

“Where do you go sometimes?” he asked, and he pressed his thumb to the slope of Harry’s lower lip. Harry took a deep breath.

He hadn’t been sure that he would ever tell Malfoy, first because it was about the Hallows and he would never have imagined trusting Malfoy enough to tell him. But also because he didn’t _want_ Malfoy to think that this was some sort of destiny, some fated path for them to tread. Because it wasn’t, of course. Not really.

But he did tell Malfoy, quietly in the shelter of their bed that morning. He told him about the mastery of Death, won with Dumbledore’s wand and James’ cloak and Death’s own Resurrection Stone; about slipping through timelines; about how, if he took all the Hallows back, he would have access to all possible universes, and that if he really tried, he could plot a path through the many universes such that he would never die. Quantum immortality, Hermione had called it, when he had first told her about the dreams, back when they had felt like something else he needed to worry about, and when he still hated Malfoy except for when he was being fucked in Malfoy’s big bed (and even then sometimes).

“So I’m sort of, flickering through timelines? Just getting glimpses, really,” he told Malfoy finally, and Malfoy looked big-eyed and hesitant at him, not saying anything in return, though Harry felt sure he must have been thinking a lot of things. And if Harry’s brain was only interested in seeing the timelines that had Malfoy in them, well… Malfoy probably didn’t need to know that yet.

“Are you going to go?” Malfoy asked, finally, and the regret in his voice was so clear that Harry could have cried, but instead he just shook his head and kissed Malfoy on his trembling sulky mouth, and Malfoy—real Malfoy—kissed him back.

* * *

Sometimes, Harry dreamed, only they weren’t really dreams at all.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr and love chatting - click here!


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